STROM THURMOND'S KIN
Class acts in American public life are so
rare these days, even the term itself has fallen into disuse. It's noteworthy, therefore,
to witness two examples ocurring in the same issue, and coming from the same family.
The first example comes from Ms. Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the 78 year old African-American
daughter of the late United States Senator, J. Strom Thurmond and a black South Carolina
woman, Carrie Butler. There had been rumors for years in Thurmond's home state of
South Carolina that the Senator had a black child out of wedlock, made all the more
scandalous because Thurmond was one of the most vocal anti-black segregationists
of our lifetime. During the 1990's, Ms. Washington-Williams began being identified
in the press as that child. She always denied that rumor, quietly, and with dignity,
explaining her visits to the Senator's Washington office by saying only that Thurmond
was a good friend.
Her recent acknowledgement of the details of her ancestry was handled with equal
taste. She was not asking for money, she explained, nor trying to make some social
or political point. She only wanted to tell the world who she was, something she
had not been able to do for some 60 years. "Strom Thurmond was my father,"
she began, in a prepared statement. "I have known this since 1941, when I was
16 years old." She later added, "I am Essie Mae Washington-Williams, and
I am free." Free, presumably, from a longtime burden of secrecy.
But equally classy was the response from the late Senator Thurmond's white descendants.
Asked if Ms. Washington-Williams' claim was true, a spokesperson for Thurmond's white
children answered, simply, yes. "As J. Strom Thurmond has passed away and cannot
speak for himself," the family attorney said, "the Thurmond family acknowledges
Ms. Essie Mae Washington-Williams' claim to her heritage. We hope this acknowledgment
will bring closure for Ms. Williams."
You have only to note the contrast with the sad, woeful example of the white descendants
of Thomas Jefferson, who continue to roll around in the dust trying to rid themselves
of the mud of history, kicking their legs in protest at the thought that they might
have distant cousins who happen to be black.
I first heard Ms. Washington-Williams' name from a man named Lamar Dawkins, a little
over 20 years ago, while we sat on top of some boxes of whiskey in the front of one
of his Orangeburg, South Carolina liquor stores. I don't remember how the subject
came up, but he confirmed that he knew that Thurmond had a black daughter. "She
used to room with us while she attended South Carolina State College," he said.
Having heard the rumors many times over, myself, I was skeptical. "How do you
know that this was Thurmond's daughter?" I asked him. "Because he used
to visit her," Dawkins said.
I had been in the Deep South for more than 10 years, by then, walking in the deep
faultines of the black-white racial divide and fighting in the battles to wipe out
the lingering residue of slavery. Since I first started seeing Senator Thurmond on
television in the 1960's, his cries against the civil rights demonstrators and his
calls for the retention of segregation, I considered him an enemy of black people.
I later learned that Thurmond got his political training sitting on the knee of the
Senator Ben Tillman--Pitchfork Ben--an American race-terrorist by most definitions,
one of the architects of Southern segregation, who once publicly boasted that white
folks ran black people out of South Carolina government in the 1870's, at the end
of Reconstruction, using "fraud and violence." At the time of my conversation
with Mr. Dawkins, I was part of a statewide South Carolina coalition that was conducting
a spirited and vocal campaign against Senator Thurmond and his stated desire to kill
the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
That Thurmond had a black daughter came as absolutely no surprise to me. Like most
African-Americans, I have my own black-white stories I could tell. What surprised
me about Mr. Dawkins' revelation was that Thurmond visited her. I remember going
home and sitting up, thinking, for much of the rest of the night, staring out across
moonlit fields where slavery crews once labored, aware of how little I knew both
about Strom Thurmond, and about the complexities of race relations in the South.
The story that the old folks used to tell me in South Carolina was that Ben Tillman,
Strom Thurmond's political mentor, went somewhat crazy at the end of his life, spending
his last days waving a wobbly cane at the stray black person passing by his front
porch, screaming "Keep the niggers off the polls! Keep the niggers off the polls!"
Tillman is supposed to have died that way, thrashing against long-gone black enemies
who visited him at his bedside, unseen by anyone but him.
We do not know if any similar apparitions haunted Senator Thurmond at his end.
The Mormons believe that the actions of the living can redeem the sins of the ancestors.
If that is true, then the actions of Strom Thurmond's children--both the white and
the black--must go a long way toward bringing him peace. A long way, too, towards
healing the great American rift that is race.